ABSTRACT
This paper is based on a talk within a symposium delivered to the Jean Piaget Society in Amsterdam 2007. Before this talk, the presenters were asked to address four questions by the chair, Ulrich Müller. These were:
How does neuroscientific research advance our understanding of morality/moral development?
Do the findings from neuroscientific research necessitate a reconceptualization of moral development (and if so, to what extent)?
What are limitations of neuroscientific research in advancing our understanding of moral development? Can these limitations be overcome?
How would a productive collaboration of the neuroscience of morality and traditional psychological research on moral development look like?
My hope in this paper is to address these questions with reference to recent work stressing the critical role of emotion and brain regions such as the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in moral reasoning. But before beginning, it is necessary to briefly sketch what I, at least, consider neuroscientific data. There are some who consider only data obtained by brain-imaging methodologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as neuroscientific. Such a restrictive definition will not be followed here. Within this chapter the definition of neuroscientific data is considerably broader and also includes both neuropsychological (on patients with neurological lesions) and neuropsychiatric studies (on patients with psychiatric conditions). While it appears obvious that neuropsychological data should be considered neuroscientific, considerable basic neuroscience work on animals involves lesion methodology; hence, some might question the brain basis of neuropsychiatric work. However, fMRI work with many psychiatric populations, including those referenced in this paper, has allowed considerable progress in specifying their neural pathophysiology (Finger et al., 2008; Frith … Frith, 2006; Marsh et al., 2008).